A Bend in the River

by V. S. Naipaul

  He didn’t talk about history or about Theodor Mommsen. I didn’t know what he was doing in his study, and Yvette couldn’t tell me; she wasn’t too interested. At one time I got the impression that he was reading old things he had written. He mentioned a diary he had kept when he had first come out to the country. He had forgotten so many things, he said; so many things were doomed to be forgotten. That used to be one of his dinner-table themes; he seemed to recognize that, and broke off. Later he said, “Strange, reading those diaries. In those days you used to scratch yourself to see whether you bled.”

  The insurrection added to his confusion; and after the madonna statue in the Domain had been smashed he became very nervous. It wasn’t the President’s habit to appear to support those of his men who had been attacked; he tended to dismiss them. And Raymond now lived in fear of dismissal. This was what it had come down to for him—a job, a house, his livelihood, simple security. He was a defeated man, and the house in the Domain was like a house of death.

  The loss was mine as well. That house was important to me; and much, as I now saw, depended on the health and optimism of both the people who lived in it. A defeated Raymond made nonsense of my evenings there. Those evenings in the house were part of my relationship with Yvette; they couldn’t simply be transferred to another site. That would have meant a new geography, another kind of town, another kind of relationship, not the one I had.

  My life with Yvette depended on the health and optimism of all three of us. I was astonished by this discovery. I had discovered it first about myself, when I was under pressure from the officials. I wanted to hide from her then. I felt I could go to her, and be with her in the way I wanted, only in strength, as I had always gone to her. I couldn’t present myself to her as a man tormented and weakened by other men. She had her own cause for restlessness; I knew that, and I couldn’t bear the idea of the lost coming together for comfort.

  It was at this time—as though we understood one another—that we began to space out our meetings. The first days without Yvette, the first days of solitude, subsiding excitement and clear vision, were always a relief. I could even pretend that I was a free man and that it was possible to do without her.

  Then she would telephone. The knowledge that I was still needed would be like satisfaction enough, and would be converted, while I waited for her in the flat, into irritation and self-disgust, which would continue right up to the moment when, after pattering up the external staircase, she came into the sitting room, all the strain of Raymond and the intervening days showing on her face. Then very soon, in my own mind, the intervening days would drop away; time would telescope. Physically now I knew her so well; one occasion would very soon seem linked to the last.

  But that idea of continuity, however overpowering at those intimate, narrow moments, was an illusion, as I knew. There were the hours and days in her house, with Raymond; there was her own privacy, and her own search. She had less and less news. There were events now we didn’t share, and there were fewer things that could be told me without some gloss or explanation.

  She telephoned me now every ten days. Ten days seemed to be the limit beyond which she couldn’t go. It occurred to me on one of these days—when, the big foam bed already straightened, she was making up her face and considering parts of herself in the dressing table mirror, before going back to the Domain—it occurred to me then that there was something bloodless about our relationship just at that moment. I might have been a complaisant father or husband, or even a woman friend, watching her prepare herself for a lover.

  An idea like that is like a vivid dream, fixing a fear we don’t want to acknowledge, and having the effect of a revelation. I suppose that, thinking of my own harassment and Raymond’s defeat, I had begun to consider Yvette a defeated person as well, trapped in the town, as sick of herself and the wasting asset of her body as I was sick of myself and my anxieties. Now, looking at Yvette in front of the dressing table mirror, seeing her bright with more than I had just given her, I saw how wrong I had been. Those blank days when she was away from me, those days about which I didn’t inquire, would have been full of possibilities for her. I began to wait for confirmation. And then, two meetings later, I thought I found it.

  I knew her so well. With her, even now, I had never ceased to look outward from myself. No other way would have had meaning, no other way would have been possible. What she drew out of me remained extraordinary to me. Her responses were part of the gift, and I had grown used to them as they had developed; I had learned to gauge them finely. On each occasion I was aware of her sensual memory of me beginning to work, linking the present to the past. But now, on the occasion I speak of, her responses were confused. Something had intervened; some new habit had begun to form, breaking up the delicate membrane of older memory. It was what I had been expecting. It had to be, one day. But the moment was like poison.

  Afterwards came that bloodless interlude. The big foam bed had been made up—that housewifely service still, after what used to be passion. I was standing. She was standing too, considering her lips in the mirror.

  She said, “You make me look so good. What will I do without you?” That was a standard courtesy. But then she said, “Raymond will want to make love to me when he sees me looking like this.” And that was unusual, not like her at all.

  I said, “Does it excite you?”

  “Older men are not as repulsive as you seem to think. And I am a woman, after all. If a man does certain things to me, I react.”

  She didn’t mean to wound me, but she did. And then I thought: But she’s probably right. Raymond’s like a whipped boy. It’s all he can turn to now.

  I said, “I suppose we’ve made him suffer.”

  “Raymond? I don’t know. I don’t think so. He’s never given any sign. Of course, he may tell himself something different now.”

  I walked with her to the landing: the shadow of the house over the yard, the trees above the houses and the wooden outbuildings, the golden afternoon light, the dust in the air, the flamboyant blooms, the cooking smoke. She hurried down the wooden steps to where the sunlight, slanting between the houses, struck full on her. Then, above the noises of the surrounding yards, I heard her drive off.

  And it was only some days later that I thought how strange it was for us to have talked of Raymond at that moment. I had talked of Raymond’s pain when I was thinking of my own, and Yvette had talked of Raymond’s needs when she was thinking of her own. We had begun to talk, if not in opposites, at least indirectly, lying and not lying, making those signals at the truth which people in certain situations find it necessary to make.

  I was in bed one evening, about a week later, reading in one of my encyclopaedia magazines about the “big bang” origin of the universe. It was a familiar topic; I liked reading in my encyclopaedias about things I had read in other encyclopaedias. This kind of reading wasn’t for knowledge; I read to remind myself in an easy and enjoyable way of all the things I didn’t know. It was a form of drug; it set me dreaming of some impossible future time when, in the middle of every kind of peace, I would start at the beginning of all subjects and devote my days and nights to study.

  I heard a car door slam. And I knew, before I heard the footsteps on the staircase, that it was Yvette, wonderfully arrived at this late hour, without warning. She hurried up the steps; her shoes and clothes made an extraordinary amount of noise in the passage; and she pushed the bedroom door open.

  She was carefully dressed, and her face was flushed. There must have been some function she had been at. Dressed as she was, she threw herself on the bed and embraced me.

  She said, “I took a chance. All through dinner I was thinking about you, and as soon as I could I slipped away. I had to. I wasn’t sure you would be here, but I took the chance.”

  I could smell the dinner and the drink on her breath. It had all been so quick—from the sound of the car door to this: Yvette on the bed, the empty room transformed, Yvette in that exclamato
ry, delighted mood which was like the mood that had overtaken her the first time we had come back to the flat after dinner at the Domain. I found myself in tears.

  She said, “I can’t stay. I’ll just give the god a kiss and go.”

  Afterwards she remembered the clothes of which so far she had been quite careless. Standing before the mirror, she raised her skirt to pull down her blouse. I, at her insistence, stayed in the bed.

  Holding her head to one side, looking at the mirror, she said, “I thought you might have been in your old haunts.”

  She seemed to be talking more mechanically now. The mood she had brought to the room had left her. At last she was ready. When she looked from the mirror to me she seemed once again, though, to be genuinely pleased with herself and with me, pleased at her little adventure.

  She said, “I’m sorry. But I have to go.” When she was almost at the door she turned and smiled and said, “You don’t have a woman hidden in the cupboard, do you?”

  It was so out of character. It was so much the kind of thing I had heard from whores who thought they should pretend to be jealous in order to please. It blasted the moment. Opposites: again this communication by opposites. That woman in the cupboard: that other person outside. That journey out from the Domain: that other journey back. Affection, just before betrayal. And I had been in tears.

  It exploded then, all that had been building up in me since she had begun to straighten her clothes. And I was out of the bed, and between her and the door.

  “Do you think I’m Raymond?”

  She was startled.

  “Do you think I’m Raymond?”

  This time she was given no chance to reply. She was hit so hard and so often about the face, even through raised, protecting arms, that she staggered back and allowed herself to fall on the floor. I used my foot on her then, doing that for the sake of the beauty of her shoes, her ankles, the skirt I had watched her raise, the hump of her hip. She turned her face to the floor and remained still for a while; then with a deep breath such as a child draws before it screams, she began to cry, and that wail after a time broke into real, shocking sobs. And it was like that in the room for many minutes.

  I was sitting, among the clothes I had taken off before going to bed, in the round-backed Windsor chair against the wall. The palm of my hand was stiff, swollen. The back of my hand, from little finger to wrist, was aching; bone had struck bone. Yvette raised herself up. Her eyes were slits between eyelids red and swollen with real tears. She sat on the edge of the foam mattress, at the corner of the bed, and looked at the floor, her hands resting palm outwards on her knees. I was wretched.

  She said after a time, “I came to see you. It seemed such a good thing to do. I was wrong.”

  Then we said nothing.

  I said, “Your dinner?”

  She shook her head slowly. Her evening was ruined; she had given it up—but how easily! And that head-shaking gesture made me enter into her earlier joy, now gone. My error: I was too ready to see her as someone lost.

  She prised her shoes off, using one foot against the other. She stood up, undid her skirt and took it off. Then, just as she was, with her hair done up, her blouse on, she got into the bed, pulled the top cotton sheet over herself and moved to the far side of the bed, always hers. She settled her fluffed-out head on the pillow, turned her back to me; and the encyclopaedia magazine, which had remained on that side of the bed, fell to the floor with its own little noise. And that was how, at this time of farewell, in this parody of domestic life, we stayed for a while, oddly reposed.

  She said after some time, “Aren’t you coming?”

  I was too nervous to move or talk.

  A while later, turning to me, she said, “You can’t keep sitting on that chair.”

  I went and sat on the bed beside her. Her body had a softness, a pliability, and a great warmth. Only once or twice before had I known her like that. At this moment! I held her legs apart. She raised them slightly—smooth concavities of flesh on either side of the inner ridge—and then I spat on her between the legs until I had no more spit. All her softness vanished in outrage. She shouted, “You can’t do that!” Bone struck against bone again; my hand ached at every blow; until she rolled across the bed to the other side and, sitting up, began to dial the telephone. Who was she telephoning at this hour? Who could she turn to, who was she so sure of?

  She said, “Raymond. Oh, Raymond. No, no. I’m all right. I’m sorry. I’m coming right away.”

  She put on her skirt and shoes, and through the door that she left open she swung out into the passage. No pause, no hesitation: I heard her pattering down the staircase—what a sound now! The bed, where nothing had occurred, was in a mess—for the first time, after she had been: I had had the last of that housewifely service. There were the marks of her head on the pillow, the gathers in the sheet from her movements: things now rare, indescribably precious to me, those relics in cloth that would go so soon. I lay down where she had lain, to get her smell.

  Outside the door Metty said, “Salim?” He called again, “Salim.” And he came in, in his underpants.

  I said, “Oh, Ali, Ali. Terrible things happened tonight. I spat on her. She made me spit on her.”

  “People quarrel. After three years a thing doesn’t just end like this.”

  “Ali, it isn’t that. I couldn’t do anything with her. I didn’t want her, I didn’t want her. That is what I can’t bear. It’s all gone.”

  “You mustn’t stay inside. Come outside. I will put on my pants and shirt and I will walk with you. We will walk together. We will walk to the river. Come, I will walk with you.”

  The river, the river at night. No, no.

  “I know more things about your family than you, Salim. It is better for you to walk it off. It is the best way.”

  “I’ll stay here.”

  He stood about for a little, then he went to his room. But I knew that he was waiting and watching. All the back of my swollen hand was aching; my little finger felt dead. The skin was blue-black in parts—that too now a relic.

  I was ready when the telephone rang.

  “Salim, I didn’t want to leave. How are you?”

  “Dreadful. And you?”

  “When I left I drove slowly. Then after the bridge I drove very fast, to get back here to telephone you.”

  “I knew that you would. I was waiting for it.”

  “Do you want me to come back? The road is quite empty. I can be back in twenty minutes. Oh, Salim. I look dreadful. My face is in an awful state. I will have to hide for days.”

  “You will always look wonderful to me. You know that.”

  “I should have given you some Valium when I saw how you were. But I thought about that only when I was in the car. You must try to sleep. Make some hot milk and try to sleep. It helps to have a hot drink. Let Metty make some hot milk for you.”

  Never closer, never more like a wife, than at this moment. It was easier to talk on the telephone. And when that was over, I began to watch through the night, waiting for daylight and another telephone call. Metty was sleeping. He had left the door of his room open, and I heard his breathing.

  There came a moment, with the coming of the light, when suddenly the night became part of the past. The brush strokes on the white-painted window panes began to show, and at that time, out of my great pain, I had an illumination. It didn’t come in words; the words I attempted to fit to it were confused and caused the illumination itself to vanish. It seemed to me that men were born only to grow old, to live out their span, to acquire experience. Men lived to acquire experience; the quality of the experience was immaterial; pleasure and pain—and above all, pain—had no meaning; to possess pain was as meaningless as to chase pleasure. And even when the illumination vanished, became as thin and half nonsensical as a dream, I remembered that I had had it, that knowledge about the illusion of pain.

  The light brightened through the white-painted windows. The disturbed room changed its c
haracter. It seemed to have become stale. The only true relic was now my aching hand, though if I had looked I would have found a hair or two from her head. I dressed, went downstairs and, giving up the idea of a morning walk, began to drive about the awakening town. I felt refreshed by the colours; I thought this early morning drive was something I should have done more often.

  Just before seven I went to the centre, to Bigburger. Sacks and boxes of uncollected rubbish were on the pavement. Ildephonse was there, the jacket of his uniform now as worn as the décor. Even at this early hour Ildephonse had been drinking; as with most Africans, he needed just a little of the weak local beer to top up and get high. He had known me for years; I was the first customer of the day; yet he hardly acknowledged me. His beer-glazed eyes stared past me at the street. In one of the lines or furrows of his lower lip he had fitted a toothpick, very precisely, very snugly, so he could talk or let his lower lip fall without the toothpick being disturbed; it was like a trick.

  I called him back from wherever he was, and he gave me a cup of coffee and a slice of processed cheese in a roll. That was two hundred francs, nearly six dollars; prices were ridiculous these days.

  A few minutes before eight, Mahesh came. He had been letting himself go. He had always been proud of his smallness and spareness. But he wasn’t as spare as he had been; I could just begin to see him as a simpler kind of small fat man.

  The effect of his arrival on Ildephonse was electric. The glazed look left Ildephonse’s eyes, the toothpick disappeared, and he began to jump about, smiling and welcoming the early morning customers, mainly guests from the van der Weyden.

  I was hoping that Mahesh would notice my condition. But he made no reference to it; he didn’t even seem surprised to see me.

  He said, “Shoba wants to see you, Salim.”